In 2015, multi-national Fleetcor requested NSP, their IT solutions provider, migrate data from Auckland-based servers to their European data centre based in Prague. Whilst experts in data migration, this is the largest project of this nature undertaken by NSP to date, moving a total of 125 virtual machines holding 40TB of data across 18,000 kilometres to Europe. Additional complexity resulted as the client opted to overhaul all their IT systems to coincide with the data migration project.

Background

Fleetcor started in New Zealand in fuel card management and have evolved into supporting their customers with full charge card facilities, total fleet management, taxi management and complex loyalty operations. They pride themselves on meeting the needs of their customers as they demand smarter ways of doing business, navigating through the complexity to introduce market leading solutions.

Four years ago when NSP were appointed by Fleetcor, they were looking for an IT systems provider that was fully qualified in virtual machine technology to support their pathway towards virtualisation. One of the core objectives from their IT supplier was that they had a solid and trusted reputation with sufficient size and scale to support Fleetcor’s substantial requirements.

Business needs

With the parent company already committed to cloud-based storage and Fleetcor’s Auckland-based servers reaching end of life, a full review of IT requirements to support the future growth of the business was undertaken by Fleetcor. The NSP team were then briefed to commence the process for moving non-localised infrastructure to their parent company’s European data centre, based in Prague, merging the New Zealand data into the existing platform.

Fleetcor were aware that changes resulting from large scale projects of this nature could create downtime and potential outages. They were also unsure about how their customer experience would be affected.

Solution

This was a very complex project due to the size, scale and sheer quantity of data to be moved internationally and Fleetcor’s key team members being based in Atlanta as well as Prague. NSP have been true partners with Fleetcor with the role growing organically throughout the project.

As Jonathan Prentice, Solution Architect for NSP says “We developed a process where the data migrated firstly to a new Auckland-based data centre, and then onto the Prague facility using WAN accelerators for efficient upload. Each production server was copied five times, for upload, development, user acceptance testing, business analysis and then quality control, and then fully deduped to ensure clean data for storage in Prague.”

NSP recommended and purchased the new hardware required in Auckland and whilst overhauling the Auckland data centre NSP replaced UPS, Switch, patch panels and other technologies.

“It helps us that NSP have experience in this area, having undertaken many similar although not identical projects. Our parent company was happy to sign off the project at Board level knowing that we had a strong team working with us.”

Todd Preston, IT Operations Manager, Fleetcor Australasia

Fleetcor took the opportunity to overhaul all of their IT systems at the same time as the data migration project, including:

setting up the latest version of Veeam to run with one central point across multiple sites for backup and replication

installation of updated RDS technology allowing customers to connect to the Fleetcor network in new ways

ensuring MailMarshall runs concurrently in Prague and Auckland

installation of the latest Windows servers internally

Outcome

This is the largest project of this nature undertaken by the Fleetcor team internationally, and the recommendations and commitment made by NSP have ensured smooth delivery of the data migration to date. Data synchronisation will be ongoing until the Auckland centre is decommissioned later in 2016.

NSP have become very involved in the VMware infrastructure in Prague which was unexpected and a necessity due to the limited resource available within the Prague-based team. They have also aided the Prague team with hosting and infrastructure development.

“The NSP team has a good depth of knowledge, are very quick to respond and make themselves available outside of the normal working hours. Because NSP know the technology it is simpler for us to make choices. Working so closely with them has resulted in an even stronger relationship.”

Todd Preston, IT Operations Manager, Fleetcor Australasia

Pull Quote Two

“It helps us that NSP have experience in data migration, having undertaken many similar although not identical projects. Our parent company was happy to sign off the project at Board level knowing that we had a strong team working with us.”